I've tried Mint and Ubuntu and other flavours I can't always remember, various different frontends, I've used Raspbian, octopi, I've installed alternative Android OSes, and none of them have alleviated the pain of installing an OS that fucks up basic things on a regular basis.

Hell, just yesterday I was following a tutorial on how to install an audio amplifier on a retropie and it just failed. The audio test keeps going wrong in different ways each time I try. Every piece of hardware and software involved was known to the tutorial and matched to mine exactly, and still something unknown went wrong and I'll have to hunt down the reason. Something to do with GPIONext.service not starting properly. It's going to be a painful couple of hours mashing my face against this issue until I can figure it out, at the very least.

Like, nice pitch but I've heard too many times "this flavour of Linux is the perfect beginner distro!" only to find that no, this platform has more rough edge than surface and a fresh coat of paint hasn't changed that.

All I'm saying is that if a ubiquitous AI spy is the future of Windows then I guess I am forced to deal with that pain if the only alternative I can envision is to walk into the sea and never return.

I went to Linux because a colleague next to me handed me a Fedora DVD after having issues with company Windows.

I installed Linux many times on various hardware configurations since then.

I don't think I've ever had a pain installing it, perhaps once when Ubuntu had messed up installer with custom LUKS setup.

I recall there's some sort of driver called synaptic that makes touchpads work, but the only reason you even need to think about it is because hardware manufacturers don't make drivers for linux, and that's a large source of the problems.

The linux evangelists can say that's not linux's fault, but it is linux's problem, and so far the solutions are incomplete.

I remember when Windows 95 came out and my dad explained to me that microsoft had made the system so successful by working with manufacturers to build a database of drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware, so the system would work on almost any machine.

Prior to that I remember having to know what brand of soundcard I had so I could manually configure it within each individual game I wanted to play using a command line based tool. I had to remember Creative Sound Blaster and hunt it down in the menus. Linux doesn't have that, in fact there's still a lot of messing about with command line based tools.